Both books under review concern themselves with British literary and cultural constructions of the vagrant tramp during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each is a valuable contribution to scholarship on how discourses of the wandering classes have embedded themselves into policies and populist narratives that have often rendered these groups invisible. (N. J. Crowson, Victorian Studies, Vol. 66 (3), 2024)
Luke Lewin Davies s The Tramp in British Literature, 1850 1950 is an impressively detailed, critical, historically informed, and accessibly written engagement with the evolving representation and self-representation of vagrants and vagrancy in Britain across centuries. It is the first full-length work to
cover the topic of the tramp in such a comprehensive fashion and offers a startlingly broad survey of the subject. it is of wide interest, and deserves to be widely read. (Mary M. Burke, English Studies, July 27, 2023)
This study incorporates writings about life on the road in other countries as well, which leads to interesting comparisons, and moves away from a focus on nationality and towards a more universal understanding of homelessness. This is a truly comprehensive study of writings sheer scale of the writings incorporated can only have been achieved by a writing style that does not waste words, and which is yet not dry but happily readable. It is a truly stunning achievement. (Ana Alicia Garza, Fiona Snailham, Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Heather Hind and William Baker, The Year's Work in English Studies, July 17, 2023)
Davies s The Tramp in British Literature, 1850 1950 offers an immensely detailed account of the tramp in literary texts that span more than a century, with a focus on the late-Victorian age. The study is well-structured and indeed very clearly signposted, allowing the reader to navigate this wealth of information and detailed analysis. (Tamara S. Wagner, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 40 (1), March, 2023)
It is an extraordinarily comprehensive study of tramp writing in the nineteenth century. Davies also incorporates an impressively concise history of the genre from the sixteenth century to the middle of the twenty-first. This readable and authoritative account encompasses sound theoretical analysis and detailed explorations of a selection of memoirs and literary treatments. Davies s writing is succinct, almost scientific at times. (Ana Alicia Garza, The Times Literary Supplement, the-tls.co.uk, December 2, 2022)
Some thirty-three memoirists and eighteen fiction writers are discussed in what Davies claims is the first comprehensive survey of tramp literature. Real homeless writers are amongst them. Davies s radical analyses are always fascinating and this book is well worth reading whether you are an academic or not. (Orwell Society Review, Autumn, 2022)
Davies book is the most comprehensive text available on tramp fiction, biography and autobiography in the many different forms that Davies presents it. I will have to read this book more than once to fully appreciate its scope and content, including the countless delightful anecdotes from the subject s of Davies curiosity. Among other things, this text has left me with a formidable list of book titles that I must now locate and read to further enrich my own appreciation of vagabond literature. (Ian Cutler, Compulsive Reader, compulsivereader.com, March 16, 2022)
Davies s book is valuable from the point of view of the number of novels and memoirs he considers in his fascinating and wide-ranging survey of tramp literature. Most of us will never get the opportunity to read the books, and perhaps wouldn t be keen to do so. They were not all masterpieces. But he makes each book seem relevant within his chosen framework and provides a great deal of information about them and their writers in good, direct prose. (Jim Burns, THE PENNILESS PRESS ON-LINE, pennilesspress.co.uk, February, 2023)
Full of interest and populated by wonderful and sometimes hateful figures, anecdote, humour and sadness. (Jason Crimp, The Orwell Society Journal, September, 2022)
Essenital reading. (Kirsty Allison, Ambit Magazine, November, 2022)
